The teachers and students who participated in the excavation work at the School of Archaeology and Museum of Sichuan University still have vivid memories of the excavation process of the golden mask. They told reporters that the golden mask was first discovered on January 5th in a sacrificial pit. At the beginning, due to only cleaning out the partial parts of the goldware, it did not attract much attention from everyone. As the fill in the pit was cleared layer by layer, the scope of the gold artifacts exposed became larger and larger, and everyone realized that this may not be a common artifact.

And as the outline of the golden mask became clearer, the archaeologists in the entire excavation area were boiling.

How to safely and scientifically extract the golden mask has become a challenge. According to the excavators, it is not complicated to simply remove an object from the fill. For gold artifacts, their state in the pit is relatively stable after the surrounding fill is cleared.

However, every artifact buried for thousands of years is not isolated. If the artifact is taken away recklessly, it may break the correlation between artifacts, and we will lose the clues to explore the reasons and stories behind them.

After repeated deliberation and discussion, archaeologists and cultural preservation personnel from the School of Archaeology and Cultural Heritage at Sichuan University, the Sichuan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, and the Chengdu Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology extracted this golden mask on February 2nd and sent it to the laboratory for careful cleaning and restoration. This incomplete yet shocking golden mask finally appeared to the world.